Jackie Wullschlager 'Hans Christian Andersen' 1

Jackie Wullschlager ‘Hans Christian Andersen’ From the illustrated exhibition guide The British Library: ISBN 0712306838 A pair of red shoes, a tin soldier, a darning needle, a collar, a porcelain shepherdess, a spinning top and a ball… the everyday world of inanimate objects comes alive in the stories of Hans Christian Andersen more vividly than anywhere else in literature. His genius was above all to make the imagined world of storytelling brilliantly real. Although a sophisticated author, he had both the child’s instinctive empathy with objects and people, and an unbridled infant egoism which enabled him to see his own story in all things, whether it be a snowman or a soldier, a silver shilling or a butterfly. ‘I have heaps of material’, he said once, ‘it often seems to me as if every hoarding, every little flower is saying to me, “Look at me, just for a moment, and then my story will go right through you”, and then, if I feel like it, I have the story’. He is a writer, according to novelist and Hans Christian Andersen-bicentennial ambassador A.S. Byatt, who ‘can make us see a palace of ice, a forest of seaweed, a mechanical nightingale, a naked king clothed in imaginary clothes, a princess on a tower of mattresses over a pea, so that it is in many cases our first lesson in invention’. Traditional folk tales, passed on by oral lore from generation to generation, have anonymous authors, and their landscapes and characters – the dark wood, the handsome prince – are archetypal rather than individualised. Andersen, by contrast, made up his own tales. The great difference, and his great strength, is his sharply personal tone, the rich, fantastical detail and the distinct, piquant humour. Andersen was the first writer to elevate the fairy tale to literary art. His is a voice unique in storytelling: while capturing the mythic resonance of traditional tales, he transformed folk-story listeners into imaginative readers, making them suffer in the cold palace of the Snow Queen, fear for the agony of the Little Mermaid, or writhe in embarrassment for the Ugly Duckling and even for the naked monarch of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. ‘When I was little I half-hated him for it’, A.S. Byatt wrote, ‘But he crept into my heart like the splinter of broken mirror of little Kai, making the child see the world grim and terrifying.’ Such precisely emotional responses to Andersen are common. They are what urged me to want to unravel and write his biography. They inspired diverse writers: Oscar Wilde, whose fairy tale motifs – ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, the swallow in ‘The Happy Prince’ – come straight out of Andersen; Thomas Mann, who called ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ ‘fundamentally the story of my life’; and C.S. Lewis, whose White Witch of Narnia luring young Edmund to the land that is always winter, is a descendent of Andersen’s romantic seductress the Snow Queen. Emotional responses are even what drove Andersen’s early English translators to engage so passionately with him, that they changed his stories – Alfred Wehnert in 1861, for example, enraged that in ‘The Nightingale’ the emperor’s court preferred the mechanical bird, lost the satire when he felt compelled to add ‘the practised ear of a musician might easily have detected a grating sound of the machinery. But the reader must recollect that they were only Chinese.’ Composers, actors, dancers and impresarios, from Stravinsky, Alexandre Benois and Diaghilev’s lush art nouveau ballet Le Rossignol 1 (The Nightingale), to Leonid Massine and Robert Helpmann’s The Red Shoes, have similarly been driven to bring to life their own Andersen stagings. As the British Library exhibition shows, Andersen’s universe is, like the theatre, a world of its own in which some of the great unchanging themes of art – childhood, love, loss and death – are distilled. They are starkly dramatised in ways that a child can grasp, yet built up out of shadowy depths which one appreciates only later, and which invite creative interpretations. ‘I seize an idea for the grown-ups’, Andersen wrote, ‘and then tell the story to the little ones while always remembering that Father and Mother often listen, and you must also give them something for their minds’. It is one of the ironies of the relationship between his life and his art that Andersen, arch-creator of the 19th-century bourgeois idyll of childhood, grew up far removed from the charmed nursery circle that stories such as ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’, ‘The Little Fir Tree’ and ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’ encapsulate. Born in 1805 in Odense, a country town on the island of Funen in Denmark, he was the son of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman and spent his childhood in abject poverty. In fanciful form, he retold his mother’s hard life in the story ‘She Was No Good’; Vilhelm Pedersen’s illustration – made in Andersen’s lifetime – faithfully captures its sad details. Andersen’s father, an intelligent, depressive, under-educated man who read his son tales from the Arabian Nights and made him toy theatres, died in 1814, and Andersen became known in the slums of Odense as a lonely, gawky, ridiculous boy who dressed his dolls, wrote plays and sang in a beautiful tenor voice while the other children were street-fighting. His grandfather was mad; his gentle grandmother worked in a lunatic asylum where she and other old ladies in the spinning room recounted old folk tales; his aunt ran a brothel and his half-sister, his mother’s illegitimate older child, was probably a prostitute; later she tried to blackmail him. Like Charles Dickens’ experience at the blacking factory, the difficulties, indignities and sense of exclusion that made up Andersen’s childhood underlay every word he wrote: his sympathy for the outsider, his identification with the child or an animal such as the duckling or the nightingale, ignored or unheeded above the crowd and babble; his vision of life as a solitary struggle often ending in tragedy. While romanticism – Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, with its idea that the child is born with an innate wisdom that the grimy commercial and industrial environment and cynical adult society slowly erodes – prepared the way for the Victorian obsession with childhood. It was not until the novels of Dickens and the stories of Andersen in the 1830s and 1840s that literature first became sensitized to the plight of the 19th-century child in a harsh utilitarian climate, and it is no coincidence that early legislation to protect children, such as the Factory Act, was passed at exactly this time. Dickens and Andersen transformed their own bitterness to express the new sensibility of a generation. Andersen’s first published work, in 1827, was a poem called ‘The Dying Child’, which, unprecedented at the time, spoke with the voice of the child himself; his story ‘The Little Match Girl’, inspired by the Danish artist Johan Lundbye’s drawing, remains iconic as an account of how a child is both desperately vulnerable and infinitely enriched by a transcendent imagination. Andersen’s own unhappiness, fixed in youth, was, says the writer Ellen Handler Spitz, ‘the deep ground of his genius ... the source of the profoundest grief in the story of the little match girl. The story is only four pages long, but it epitomises all that Andersen understood about the gap between desire and truth. In it, he honoured the rough matter of his own earliest childhood, brought it through fire, and cut a gem’. 2 After a rudimentary schooling, Andersen fled Odense, saving pocket money acquired from singing to the town’s gentry for his fare for the two-day journey to Copenhagen, the Danish capital. He needed a visa to cross from Funen to the main Danish island of Zealand – the first of many passports to dog his travelling life, immortalised in the rat demanding passports in ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ – and, his mother predicted that ‘when he sees the rough sea, he will be frightened and turn back’. But on 6 September 1819, aged 14, he reached Frederiksberg, the castle on the hill outside Copenhagen which was the king’s summer residence; he had not paid enough for the coach to take him the final lap into the capital, and he walked the last 10 miles through the suburbs. At the West Gate – the city was then locked nightly, and the king was said to sleep with the keys under his pillow – Andersen joined the carriages, traders, farmers leading their cattle, horses and riders, and other pedestrians, and entered the busy, mercantile harbour town where he knew no one and had no idea how to make a living. However, here was release from the confined expectations of Odense, and he celebrated the date every year for the rest of his life. In 1869, a banquet for 250 people was given to mark the 50th anniversary of his arrival in the city: the city with which his stories are indissolubly associated, whether it be from the dog with eyes as big as Copenhagen’s Round Towers in his first tale ‘The Tinderbox’, or his character the Little Mermaid, her image fixed in Edvard Eriksen’s 1913 sculpted figure who watches the city with its spires and bells and lights from a rock on Langeline quay, inspired by the dancer Ellen Price’s interpretation of the story at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre. A century earlier, the leaping Pierrots and ballerinas which Andersen cut out of paper, and the printed programme for the ballet Armida on 12 April 1821 – which shows the 16-year-old Andersen appearing as a troll – at this same Royal Theatre, suggest the stage-struck aspirations of the young boy in the capital.

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